Practically impossible: The quest to decipher Fez's cryptic final puzzle

Thousands of players have struggled to untangle the knotty thicket of puzzles hidden deep within Xbox 360 indie title Fez, but one particular puzzle has left all comers in fits for nearly an entire week.

I'd love to play this game when (if) it gets released on PC, but that kind of trickery ensures I'd never 100% complete it...or 209.3% complete it, apparently. The game's signature hook--platform puzzling involving cool 3d rotation--is great, but I'd never even consider converting a pattern of blinking lights into binary and then ASCII. That's a "look it up on gamefaqs" kind of puzzle.

I'd love to play this game when (if) it gets released on PC, but that kind of trickery ensures I'd never 100% complete it...or 209.3% complete it, apparently. The game's signature hook--platform puzzling involving cool 3d rotation--is great, but I'd never even consider converting a pattern of blinking lights into binary and then ASCII. That's a "look it up on gamefaqs" kind of puzzle.

Well, although I agree with you, back when I was in high school (1980's) I probably would have worked out a million permutations w/ pencil and paper. I had the time for it back then. No way I could do that now!

These articles have done a great job of providing me with the information I needed to know not to play this games; as a researcher on the theory side banging my head against the wall to solve hard puzzles is basically my day job so when I play games to relax the last thing that I want is to have to do more work. :-) But hey, to each one's own.

These articles have done a great job of providing me with the information I needed to know not to play this games; as a researcher on the theory side banging my head against the wall to solve hard puzzles is basically my day job so when I play games to relax the last thing that I want is to have to do more work. :-) But hey, to each one's own.

It's not so bad, really.

YOu can get to 200% without all that much in the way of ciphering. You can EASILY finish the game without doing any of the sort.

This reminds me of beating Star Tropics as a 10-year-old who was learning to play the violin, with no walkthrough. It's not anything on the same level, but still. (NES console craziness) Completing a seemingly hopeless puzzle is very rewarding.

This reminds me of playing Phantasy Star on the SMS with my cousin, getting to the last dungeon level and then being baffled that there was nothing on it. We tried everything we could think over a few weeks, and then started asking around if anybody knew what to do. A friend's older brother knew the secret, that you had to turn towards the wall to see the secret hidden door.

Is it just me, or does this article read like an advertisement for Fez? Sure doesn't feel like an objective review, at least. I'm not meaning to sound troll-ish...I'm just genuinely disappointed with the quality and the subject of this article.

Is it just me, or does this article read like an advertisement for Fez? Sure doesn't feel like an objective review, at least. I'm not meaning to sound troll-ish...I'm just genuinely disappointed with the quality and the subject of this article.

The article is a pretty accurate description of the process the community went through to solve the riddle of the book and monolith.

It didn't read like an advertisement to me. Fez really is awesome (although some people disagree, of course), and a huge number of people got really sucked into finding all the things hidden in it, beyond the core gameplay (which doesn't require this kind of work; this stuff is a bonus for people who like such things).

I was going to leave it to other people to find the solutions to the final mysteries in the game, but I found myself sucked into the challenge as well. Over the weekend I kept having crazy ideas about what might solve the riddles and would have to fire up the Xbox to test them, hoping that my crazy idea would turn out to be the right one. The forums were really friendly, too, with lots of people getting together and co-operating on ideas, discoveries and, of course, the brute-force attempt. It was a really cool thing which has added to the already fantastic memory I have of playing through this brilliant game for the first time. See, I'm writing like an advertisement here myself, but I have no vested interested in the game; it's because it is that good.

Only thing I saw wrong in the article was this:

Quote:

(The actual solution involves taking a blinking pattern shown by two tiny red dots and converting it first into binary and then into ASCII to get a six-button code.)

That puzzle was much more simple than stated. The flashing dots mapped directly to the left/right inputs without need to convert into binary/ASCII. You just mimic the dots.

Hey, Peter Silk here of tome decoding, er, 'fame'. This was a fun read! Since I contributed to this piece my view on the end has come more in line with Reyher's. I rather suspect that the final puzzle WAS to club together with a bunch of people online and brute force it. The clues meant this took rather quicker than it may otherwise had done, but I think if we continue to look for an explanation we'll come up empty.

And that's okay! Fez is full of examples of puzzles you solve in weird ways. One is solved by reading the achievements list, another few can be solved with QR codes, the vibration of the controller. Crowdsourcing the solution is, I suspect, just another tool in its box, and quite an unexpected one!

"Is it just me, or does this article read like an advertisement for Fez? Sure doesn't feel like an objective review, at least. I'm not meaning to sound troll-ish...I'm just genuinely disappointed with the quality and the subject of this article."

Nobody's claiming it's a review. I have no intention of playing the game, but I still found the article interesting.

There is a certain group of people who absolutely hate this game and feel it represents something that has gone terribly wrong with independent gaming. Part of it has to do with being "retro" without actually being any of the things that made old games good.

I really don't know what to think myself. The contrast in people's opinions is quite stark however.

Picked this up earlier in the week and had a blast trying to solve a lot of the puzzles. Some of them required that I look at hint threads online and some I would not have gotten alone. It reminds me of playing text/hybrid adventure games as a kid where the puzzles might literally take me a few years of pondering before I would figure out the solution. I didn't have the easy access to forums then so it took a lot longer than today's crowd-sourced world.

I am in agreement with another poster up top, games are supposed to be fun, when they reach the level of this insanity, it ceases being fun and becomes a waste of money. Alot like those Japanese "Bullet Tsunami" games where it's virtually impossible to win, unless you are willing to devote a whole ton of time.

I am in agreement with another poster up top, games are supposed to be fun, when they reach the level of this insanity, it ceases being fun and becomes a waste of money. Alot like those Japanese "Bullet Tsunami" games where it's virtually impossible to win, unless you are willing to devote a whole ton of time.

The game *is* fun. It's a neat $10 platformer with a fun mechanic and great music/ambience and if you're into such things, it's also a layered puzzle for those who enjoy solving mysteries and cracking codes.

I'll say it again--this reminds me of the old Infocom games I played as a kid where you needed to spend some serious time and sometimes brute force in order to solve all a game's puzzles. I love action games that depend on practice and dexterity but I also love brainteasers, codes, and riddles that require you to think in different ways and might not be solvable in a single sitting.

There's something to be said for a game that might take you months or more to figure out on your own. It's not something you see much of anymore. These days "extended gameplay" either means you grind for 100 hours to max out some stats or you have to play multiplayer with random tweens once you beat the 6-hour single-player campaign.